Cisco Systems Selected for EnergyAustralia Smart Grid Project

Posted on: 15 November 2010

By:chw staff

Cisco’s switches and routers designed for smart grid systems have been selected by EnergyAustralia for its smart grid project. The deal for Cisco is said to worth $7.5Million over three years. The new kit is to facilitate the delivery of a range of business critical services as well as improve mobile computing for field engineers and upgrade the network infrastructure for up to 200 substations.

The Smart Grid Smart City project is Australia’s first major smart grid and is part government funded. Other IT solution providers in involve include IBM Australia, GE Energy Australia and others. According the EnergyAustralia the equipment will be specially built for the environment and with military-grade security encryption to guarantee the secure communication across the infrastructure.

"It gives us new ways to connect a range of devices inside substations, such as data loggers and [closed circuit television], at the same time as identify, isolate, diagnose and repair faults in a smarter, faster way," said EnergyAustralia's managing director, George Maltabarow.